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Comment by Udo | Hacker News Reader

Yes, it is.

I use Linux servers mostly, but about a year ago I installed openSuSE on two new desktops. The problem was that, while sound "worked" in general, only one application could use the sound card at a time. That means when you have your audio player open, Youtube won't work at the same time. You'd have to close both apps and then re-open the browser so it could then hog the audio.

The most annoying thing about this, however, were some of my desktop Linux friends who insisted this behavior was totally acceptable and not a bug.

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"The most annoying thing about this, however, were some of my desktop Linux friends who insisted this behavior was totally acceptable and not a bug."

Bingo. Spot on, and you've hit the biggest meta-issue when discussing desktop Linux usability issues. There isn't an agreed upon definition for "acceptable" that everyone can use to determine if something is really broken or not. I hit the same issue years ago, complained on some forums, people told me it wasn't a problem, I was doing something wrong, etc. Finally someone grokked what I was describing, agreed that I would be reasonable to expect 2 apps to be able to play sound at the same time, but that it "wasn't a big deal" and "never bothered" him. For a server, yes. For a desktop environment, it's been unacceptable to me for years, and was a primary reason why I switched away from desktop linux for day-to-day work (after about 5 years of dealing with the ups and downs of desktop linux' evolution).

I don't know what decade you last tried a linux desktop but every distro I have used supports playing from multiple programs concurrently fine.

I've been running openSuSE desktops for years. When pulse became standard, I made a practice of ripping it out (rpm -e...). I've happily had plain ALSA sound with sound from multiple apps at once. No, I don't know the details - only that it works. YMMV.

probably dmix

This is absolutely unacceptable, and the main reason I still use a SoundBlaster Live instead of my onboard sound. The SBLive can do hardware mixing and the Linux driver makes this transparent, so even OSS programs can run simultaneously.

ALSA is supposed to be able to do this transparently (in software) with dmix, but in my experience that only works with ALSA-aware programs, not those using the OSS API. I don't care that on Linux OSS is deprecated: it should just work.

In short, Linux sound is still obnoxious unless you are lucky enough to have hardware mixing work, or you only use programs which properly deal with ALSA.

>I don't care that xxxx is deprecated: it should just work.

Setting aside the concept of extrapolating from a small sample size using an admittedly deprecated system (on apparently poor hardware) which hasn't seen any significant use this decade, to "Linux sound is still obnoxious"...

The temerity of insisting that any deprecated software work perfectly is appalling. I am sad to say that my imagination does not stretch so far as to envision a world where this was a reasonable expectation. The one small solace that I can bring away from your post is that such an attitude must engender its own punishment.

Most users tend to assume that things that work will continue working. This is not an unreasonable assumption. It is the status quo on Windows and, whether you or I like it or not (I don't really mind, but whatever), that's the measuring stick for Linux-on-the-desktop. That Linux does not have the same track record with regards to backwards compatibility is not a failing in the user. You don't have to fix their problem, but don't wax on about their "temerity". That makes you a dick.

As is common in pretty much every endeavor, people trump process. OSS still exists and for a decent bit of legacy software isn't going away anytime soon. Breaking it screws over users. Screwing over users makes them complain. Putting on a song and dance about how "appalled" you are at users' complaints makes you a jerk. Don't be a jerk.

Having dedicated hardware for sound mixing is always a good idea. This is especially noticeable when the CPU is under heavy load like when games are running.

Take a look on Windows:

Windows XP: hardware mixing

Windows 7: change to software mixing which cause serious latency problem http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iujDVsg_2xY

Windows 8: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/libr.../br259116.aspx they realize their mistake and go back to hardware mixing again

The only way I was able to solve the cracking and latency issues on my Linux box was to replace ALSA with OSS. Recently some newer software is causing issues again and I might have to give ALSA another shot. Things would be so much better if the Linux kernel just adopted OSS4

This just works if you use PulseAudio. OSS and ALSA applications are routed through PulseAudio.

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